Just two years ago, the container management market was worth less than US $500 million/year. By 2024, revenues in this space will more than double, to reach US $944 million (Gartner research). It is one of the fastest growing technology trends.

With more than 75 per cent of global organisations expected to be using containerised applications in production, this is a DevOps approach that cannot be ignored any longer. What’s important to understand is that it’s not just a singular one-off event for a single project. Organisations need to leverage containerisation on an ongoing basis so they can fully embrace agility, ship applications more quickly, and maximise the resource efficiency of their cloud environment.

So, for example, with containerisation, you can ship new features and fix something in production, while undertaking ongoing development and iteration critical to success. This means that immediately after you’ve encountered and identified an issue, you can start working on the solution, have it fixed in mere hours, and then push the new code into production.

What has also helped the uptake of containerisation is the accessibility of the technology. Where once you needed to be a power user to understand it, now it’s quite easy to deploy to a container environment like Kubernetes, and leverage it as a simple and straightforward platform for hosting the software.

One example that’s commonly used amongst our customers is the Azure Migration tool, which is an app containerisation tool, and one of the easiest ways to containerize asp.net web apps. From that toolset you identify a website, go back and look at all the dependencies of the .net application on it, package it, create a docker file – a container image – and deploy it within the tool itself.

The challenge to organisations – and the resistance among those that are still not utilising containerization – typically stems from a lack of understanding of the strategic value and opportunity with such a relatively new technology, and how to first leverage it.

So, for example, the effective use of containerisation requires that organisations have sound data management practices, and an understanding of the security challenges that come with this approach to development. While the technology is not necessarily complex anymore, it does still require having the right skills and talent within the team to fully capitalise on it, and the shift to incredibly rapid agile delivery, previously not possible, does carry with it the need for cultural change.

For all these challenges, working with a trusted partner, like NovaWorks, to map out the first steps into containerisation, use them as test cases to demonstrate the power of the approach, shift data and applications into containers and then manage the new environment allows to the most rapid adoption of this new, dynamic and still very new approach to DevOps.

For more information on the opportunity of containerisation, contact NovaWorks today.